PONDERING

Joel Weishaus

Around 300 million years ago the Ancestors emerged from primeval waters as an amphibious being, slithered across muddy ground and began the long evolution toward the uncanny mind in which "humanity poetically dwells."(2) Around 50,000 years ago the Ancestors drew lines and blew colors onto subterranean bulbous and fissured flickering walls, making images of animals they knew or imagined, and impressing their own hands as the first signatures of I Am, Around 2,500 years ago the Ancestors thought deeply and came up with Philosophy: the love of wisdom—to which the restless human mind quickly added ethics, metaphysics, mathematics, ontology...whatever it could use to deflate its original inspiration. However, a few of these philosophers were poets whose "bright tatters of wisdom, cast / over gray welter and spume should at any rate yield / a few visions and reflections."(3) "This pond was made deep and pure for a symbol."(4) Two famous ponds in Literary History are Henry Thoreau's Walden Pond, and Matsuo Basho's: Old pond / frog leaps in / plop! (5) While Thoreau's pond has become a tourist destination, Basho's pond remains a koan, a conundrum to ponder upon. If Narcissus would look into this nameless pond he would see his image wavering amongst a humanity haunted by its failure to create a civilization that, as a Navajo would say, "walks in beauty." Near the pond is a copse of old growth trees and ingeniously twisted vines, in which a ring of flowers nurture their fragrances as motor vehicles containing children on their way to a questionable education speed past fouling the morning's crisp air. A couple walks past holding hands, while their dog is prowling and sniffing the world into its sensitive nose.   1. Matthew Johnson, Senior Planner / Community Development. City of Forest Grove OR. 2. Martin Heidegger quoting Friedrich Hölderlin. 3. Robert Bringhurst. From, "Herakleitos." 4. H.D. Thoreau, Waden. (1854) 5. Furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizo no oto. Designed for viewing on a 13" or larger, screen.     TITLES (LINKS)   On A Cold Autumn Dawning Sweet Scent Of Autumn Shadows On A Parallel Road To The River When Earth Was Young From A Secluded Lake Unlike Walden And Its Famous Hermit This Old Pond Dreams It's Dancing Like A Pond That Can't Be As The Sun Rises The Shadows The Pond Stretches Into The Night Even Though It Knows Quacking In His Scarlet Cap And Gossamer Grass Wears The Crystals Every Pond Has Dreamed When We Walked On The Shards Scanning Water Trudging Through A Dense Fog Slips Over The Pond The Pond Flows In Around And Out On The Mountain's Lips A God When We Find That In The Beginning In His Amsterdam Studio Rembrandt What Have You Birthed A Second Time The Mountain Lifts As Memory In The Morning’s Sward Gray Sky Wingless Flight Rising In Starlight As His Singing Head Floated Down Some Walls Of Paleolithic Caves   NOTES     For Susan, as always. And for everyone who dwells upon these shores. Thank You to: The University of New Mexico, Center for Southwest Research. Portland State University, Department of Philosophy. © Joel Weishaus 2026